HBO's 'John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls' isn't a eulogy
Bill Goodykoontz
The title sets the tone: “John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
The HBO documentary — the second major film about McCain to air in two months — is a thorough and intriguing celebration of the Arizona senator’s life, with many of his political peers and opponents describing McCain’s career of service.
But, while the title is in part a nod to McCain’s favorite book, it also signifies a larger, more contemporary truth: McCain suffers from glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.
And remember, the title of Ernest Hemingway’s novel comes from a John Donne quote, which continues: “It tolls for thee.”
A personal film
The film, produced and directed by Peter Kunhardt and his sons, George and Teddy, isn’t an obituary or a eulogy, exactly, though it has aspects of that. McCain himself says, early on, “I love life, and I want to stay around forever. But I also feel that there’s a great honor that you can die with.”
In April, the PBS series “Frontline” aired “McCain,” a look at his life and political legacy. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is a far more personal film — the filmmakers spent hours with McCain both in his Sedona home and in Washington, D.C. There are testimonials from his family, as well as personal and political friends and enemies (the personal and political tend to blend over time with someone who’s been around as long as McCain).
In fact, the latter part of the film is given over mostly to just that, laudatory musings about McCain, of which he is certainly deserving. But the rest of the film sorts through McCain’s life — and his mistakes, of which he acknowledges many.
That’s far more interesting, and makes McCain far more human.
There’s plenty of footage and discussion of McCain’s family’s military history, of his being held prisoner in Vietnam after his fighter jet was shot down, and of McCain’s refusal to be released ahead of those who were there longer. By any standard, his actions, despite reading a false “confession,” were heroic. Well, any standard except President Donald Trump’s.
'That was a mistake'
McCain owns up to his mistakes. Over the course of the film, it seems as if he says, looking straight into the camera, “That was a mistake” about 10 different times. There’s footage from an interview with reporter Roger Mudd around the time of the Keating Five scandal in which Mudd introduces McCain by saying we’re about to hear a sitting U.S. senator say something they almost never say: They made a mistake.
SPECIAL REPORT:McCain a study in contradictions
We see some of his political expediency — telling South Carolina voters in 2000 that the Confederate battle flag was a symbol of heritage, for instance, something for which he later apologized. These mistakes, the film suggests, occur when McCain goes against his gut.
Sarah Palin and running for president
But the biggest mistake, by far, both in this and the “Frontline” film, is McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate when he ran for president in 2008. In both films, she’s seen as a kind of gateway drug to Trump, a legitimizing of the hateful, poisonous political wing of the Republican party that McCain despises (and, I can tell you from emails I’ve gotten whenever I’ve written about him, despises him).
New York Times columnist David Brooks says McCain “took a disease that was running through the Republican party — anti-intellectualism, disrespect for facts — and he put it right at the center of the party.”
In something of a shocker, McCain at one point says, “I should have said, 'Look, Joe Lieberman is my best friend, we should take him (as vice president).' But I was persuaded by my political advisors it would be harmful, and that was another mistake that I made.”
We hear from former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, as well as Hillary Clinton and McCain’s good friend Joe Biden. That we hear from so many Democrats points to McCain’s old-school willingness to make friends and create working relationships with those across the aisle — a willingness that’s considered a liability in our current divisive times, something Biden in particular decries.
We also hear McCain’s family — not just his wife, Cindy, and his daughter Meghan, but from his first wife, Carol, and their children. Carol says she was “blindsided” and “heartbroken” when McCain left her for Cindy. But she also says that when he ran for president, people came around asking her to trash him, and she refused, saying she would never do such a thing.
McCain vs. Trump
McCain has been much in the news the past year, often in response to something Trump has said about him or in the context of Trump’s policies. We see, again, McCain cast the fateful vote to stop Trump’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare.” This infuriated Trump, who had assumed McCain would vote yes.
Recently, when McCain issued a statement opposing Gina Haspel as director of the CIA, White House aide Kelly Sadler reportedly said McCain’s opinion “doesn’t matter” because “he’s dying anyway.”
As Meghan McCain responded, so are we all. “John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls” doesn’t dance around that fact, and instead uses it as a jumping-off point for a detailed look at a flawed, fascinating person in our flawed, fascinating times.
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Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: @goodyk.
'John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls'
8 p.m. Monday, May 28, on HBO.
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